Thursday 6 September 2012 03.45 EDT
First published on Thursday 6 September 2012 03.45 EDT

The debate over the Department of Energy and Climate Change's press release about local authority carbon emissions before the August bank holiday weekend somewhat obscured the underlying significance of the data, which was presented in a pretty raw form.

While the information released covers all of the activity within areas, it doesn't show local authorities how they are performing against their carbon-reduction commitment obligations. This information would be based on a much narrower dataset and focused on the council as an organisation.

There is a subset within the department's release designed to cover activity within the "scope of influence" of local authorities, but this relates to an old performance metric which no longer applies to councils. These figures use 2005 as a base year by which carbon emissions are measured – not 1990, which is the base year for calculating all UK greenhouse gas emissions. It's also worth noting that the department moved very quickly to explain away the 2.7% year-on-year increase in per capita emissions since 2009-10 as attributable to "unusual weather conditions".

You may be left wondering whether there is any analytical value in these spreadsheets? There is a great deal of use in this information, but not in year-on-year comparisons using individual local authorities as the unit of measurement. This data needs to be recast before it can tell us a meaningful story about councils' progress.

First, this information gives us a clear view of the national five-year trajectory from 2005. The good news is that the national grand total of carbon dioxide emissions has declined by 10% since 2005; the bad news is that the decline between 2005 and 2009 was 14% – so more than a quarter of that gain was subsequently lost in 2010. This shows how fragile the trajectory on carbon saving is and reinforces the point that the UK remains a heavily fossil-fuel-driven economy. The transition to a low carbon economy still looks a long way off.

Second, by making the right connections between datasets, the information starts to provide an insight into the economic and social activity across the UK. Specifically, we need to recognise the mobility in our economic model and the spheres of influence over emissions levels, particularly for cities and large towns. These trends are influenced by regional economic patterns of industry and commerce. These differences are obscured if we just focus on per capita figures across the board.

For example, the City of London's per capita emissions are approximately 20 times greater than most other local authorities because so few people actually live there. The city is, in effect, subsidising the carbon emissions of the dormitory towns that house its workforce.

When the figures start to be grouped into city-region clusters, a clearer carbon landscape starts to emerge. We can see how large city regions fare against smaller ones, and how the city core performs against the outer ring. We can consider aggregated carbon dioxide emissions for resources that must be planned across authorities, such as public transport.

Intuitively, you would expect the city core to produce lower per capita emissions than the outer ring; our analysis suggests that this is often – but not always – the case. Used intelligently, this information should drive policy across all regional investment areas. The question is this: is this what the policymakers want?

Nathan Goode is head of energy, environment and sustainability at Grant Thornton